Nihilist Spasm Band

Ten years after their epochal debut, the Nihilist Spasm Band finally returned with Vol. 2, drawn from a concert recorded at Toronto's Music Gallery in February 1978 and issued on Music Gallery Editions in 1979.

The decade had changed nothing about the method, and everything about its standing. The same founding members reconvened around the same homemade arsenal, but by the late 70s the rise of punk had made their refusal of competence and corporate rock look less like eccentricity and more like prophecy. Bill Exley's spoken tirades open most pieces as a kind of free-rap manifesto, berating stupidity and the idea of nationhood, before the band pulls each one apart into pure improvised matter - kazoos, the Pratt-a-various, untuned guitars and switching drummers building toward an unrelenting, weirdly joyous intensity.

One contemporary reviewer described the unrelenting beauty of the assault while admitting she felt compelled to like it. That mix of confrontation and delight is the band's signature, and Vol. 2 is among its purest distillations. Reissued by Alchemy Records, part of Jojo Hiroshige's long project of returning these Canadian originators to circulation.